This blog will follow my eighteen month LDS mission in the South. September 2013–March 2015

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Christmas Week

We sang at the Richmond Zoo last night! Every year they put on a free Live Nativity (the Zoo is owned by Church members) and they have music in between shows. We got to sing a few simple Christmas songs, and I even sang a duet with an Elder in our mission. He sings really well, and Sister Wilson told me he is going to try out for Vocal Point. I sang the first verse of Away in a Manger, then he joined me in the second, him singing melody, and me singing tenor an octave up. Then the last verse we just sang with the choir. It really turned out good! We had many more Elders than we had Sisters, but they don’t sing very loud, so it worked out right! 🙂

I’m so glad to hear about the sacrament meeting program with the Sister Missionaries in our ward at home! Things are going ok here more or less, still a few melt downs.

I got a letter from Linda and Liesa. It was so sweet of them! It means so much to me, everything is very very hard here right now. But it is good. I feel distinctly that I have been prepared for this assignment during my whole mission. Still very hard though. President and Sister Wilson know what is going on and are a good support too, they know what experiences that I am having. Due to this, we haven’t been able to do much missionary work, but I think this actually is my missionary work.

This week we will hopefully be able to see more of our investigators! We did see one investigator this week– a man from Tanzania who we are teaching in English and Swahili. He accepts everything that we teach him, and I believe he wants to be baptized! He is afraid to though, because (long story short) he is being controlled by another church around here. He is a single dad with 5 kids, the oldest around 13. He works so hard and long, and still has to take care of the kids. This church kind of ‘helps him out’ but he has to do what they say. He said that if he doesn’t they will call emigration or something? He wants to go to Tanzania to see his family, and he wants to remarry, but they won’t let him do either of those things? Seems like there are some fishy things going on here. One of the ladies from the church came in to the home while we were teaching, took one of his kids with her for something, basically without asking. It was really weird and not normal. Then she was demanding that he give her permission to see some medical records for one of the children. He just said yes to her. It seemed like she was trying to make us believe that she was helping him, but the way she acted and spoke was so weird… he told her we were teaching him English, because he was afraid she would tell everyone he is changing churches. She knew who we were though. She seemed very alarmed we were there. eeeshk.

I was asked to sing ‘O Holy Night’ in sacrament meeting yesterday! President and Sister Wilson even came to hear me 🙂 That was so nice of them! Even though we are in the same ward technically, they are almost never able to come to our ward because they are so busy. But they came yesterday just to be supportive! I love them so much.

More pictures from the Nativity!

There is this thing around here called ‘The Tacky Lights Show’. People who are crazy and want to put tons of crazy lights on their house get to be on this tour. We’ve only seen two of the houses, but here is one of them!

We have cockroaches now, by the way. The 2-inch long kind. Not exaggerating at all. It might actually be bigger than two inches, because the floor boards are 4 inches wide. They sprayed the other day, so I hope we won’t see them anymore…

Also, this is a neat pastel drawing that someone in our ward did! I thought it was cool 🙂